Re: GnatBench (from GPL edition)

[John McCabe <john@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk>]

On Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:12:55 +0200, "Dmitry A. Kazakov"
<mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:

>On Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:23:24 +0100, John McCabe wrote:
>
>> the whole GTK+ thing is still, to me, not
>> quite right on MS Windows.
>
>Yes, but it is getting better.
> 
>>>Because otherwise GPS just follows MS Visual Studio design.
>> 
>> The layout does follow the MS VS design, the look though is of a
>> rather old version of MS VS, perhaps version 2.0 or 4.0 from the
>> mid-90s.
>
>Hmm, I know all of them, and I see no any sufficient difference to GPS. In
>fact the latest VS is definitely worse, ergonomically, I mean. It
>permanently forgets its layout. For instance it kicks off the tray with the
>current source column and line numbers. Then it takes hours to get it back,
>because the configuration GUI is just typical MS: deeply nested menus and
>tabbed dialogs distributed all over the GUI combining properties carefully
>selected by a random generator... XML project files is a horror. Automated
>compilation (we are heavily using it) never works as expected, etc. File
>search which once worked reasonably is ruined now. The only great thing MS
>still has, is the debugger. But I am sure, they are working on that! (:-))

I have to agree that, in terms of function, the versions of VS I'm
using now (.NET/2002) and previously (2005), are lacking compared to
VS 6.0. In terms of how they look though, they have improved a bit
over VS 6.0.

>>>The decorations can be changed using a GTK+ RC file. I wonder why AdaCore
>>>didn't do that.
>> 
>>>But where AdaCore took time and didn't copy from MS, GPS looks pretty good.
>>>For example, graphical indication of error locations left of the editor
>>>window is a great idea.
>> 
>> Do you mean the bit where the space is used to provide a
>> representation of the whole file, a rectangle moves up and down to
>> show which part of the file you're currently viewing, and red blocks
>> show where the error is?
>
>Yes
>
>> That's interesting, but have you seen how the errors and warnings are
>> shown in Eclipse!
>
>I didn't use Eclipse yet. I know that GPS if far better than VS in that
>respect. Though GNAT error messages are better than C++ ones, but they
>still are quite useless in many cases. Normally I just look at the source
>code lines. An improvement GPS could have is to highlight error slices
>(tokens) rather than lines, as well as in the debugger. I remember National
>Instruments IDE for CVI compiler which did that.

Take a look at Eclipse. I presume you know Java well enough to have a
play with it. The error stuff is pretty good with Java.

>>>IMO the problems with GPS lie elsewhere. I mean poor design of GTK+ and
>>>GDB.
>> 
>> I'm sure GPS is a perfectly capable tool and is better than nothing
>> (the whole concept of an IDE that can be used to manage your projects
>> is quite an advancement from what went before). I don't have any real
>> gripes with functionality, just form. It seems like AdaCore have put a
>> fair amount of effort into something that is ever so slightly
>> pointless!
>
>They probably wanted to be independent on other vendors and unreliable
>C/Java mess. The only mistake they probably made was GTK+, which is still C
>and still a mess.

LOL!!